Graham (Grassroots Left)

I'm standing for Your Party's collective leadership on the Grassroots Left slate, alongside @zarahsultana @maxshanly @dykeocletian @Ana_Zardoshti & others from across social movements and trade unions. Help us build a radically democratic socialist party: grassrootsleft.org/sign-up

With the attacks on Iran's South Pars gas field and Iran's response, the war has escalated to a scale where we may sincerely see the entire region's energy infrastructure decimated. The economic ripples ensure rapid, deadly intensification of imperialism's every contradiction.

@_georgina666 Cranks of the left allying with an imagined muslim community in their heads: many such cases

Unlike most of the accounts of Iran that are obsessed with geopolitics, Kayhan Kayhan Valadbaygi offers an excellent history of #Iran in churn - the social classes at play and their tussles in reaponding to a now-fraying neoliberal global order. A must-read, esp now

Wrote my first two pieces for @VoxUmmah on Islamic Liberation Theology, it's theoretical origins and how it can be used as a framework for achieving material change. Part 1: voxummah.com/2025/09/the-th… Part 2: voxummah.com/2025/10/theolo…

Anyone who says 93 million Iranians share 1 opinion is disingenuous & also racist, even if that's internalised racism from an Iranian themselves. To think 93 million people aren't a society of individuals with different experiences, realities, desires & views is deeply racist.

@EdgeOTI My first and only thought was this song too

Robbie Williams doesn't look anything like that 🧐

5% is such a ridiculous cope as an estimate for the IRI's support base. Even Gamaan - run by a monarchist, with an obviously bogus methodology that over-samples Westernized Iranians and under-samples regime supporters - found 19.5% support in 2024. 20-30% is a good estimate. The regime is quite unpopular but it isn't anywhere near Qaddafi or Saddam levels of unpopularity. That's why there are basically zero defections.

And people say liberation theology is dead, ey bābā

Don’t believe their propaganda

@gaoblai @daniel_moi97111 When I first saw it on my feed i cringed in anticipation but then it was actually fine

Least cringe MLs That's a compliment, this manages to escape being cringe and is actually kinda based

Funny story about Iranian identity and whiteness: the idea is about 200 years old and rooted in anti-Arab/Muslim racism and forced alignment with Europe. In the 19th century, Persian intellectuals like Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh began promoting the idea that Iranians were an “Aryan” people and that they came from this broader Indo-European civilization rather than the Arab and Islamic world that had shaped Iran for centuries by that point. The idea drew heavily from European Orientalist racial theories that classified languages and peoples into hierarchies - w/Aryan on top. This idea became institutionalized under Reza Shah’s nationalist project in the 20th century and it emphasized Iran’s pre-Islamic past and ‘Aryan’ heritage. In 1935 he even asked foreign governments to stop using “Persia” and instead use Iran, which comes ffrom ‘Aryanam’, (land of the Aryans). …which is funny if you meet secular diaspora Iranians today and see how they identify themselves But even funnier is how in the 30s, German Nazi racial theorists sometimes classified Iranians as Aryan for diplomatic purposes (this wasn’t so b&w - there were tiered Aryans with Iranians in the bottom tier, they weren’t part of the Nordic Aryan master race). Not only did Germany then become one of Iran’s biggest trading partners in the late 30s but Nazi propaganda showed Iran as a fellow resistor to British and Soviet “imperialism” and gave Iranians in Germany racial exemptions. And German Nazis were rampant in Iran - they had their own propaganda networks inside Iran to push anti-Soviet, anti-British propaganda. Iran’s strategic location and resources made it important to Nazi geopolitical ambitions so treating Iranians as “Aryan” in certain contexts was also a strategic move. Anyway, there’s so much more to this part of history, but if Pahlavists sound like crazy Nazis it’s because well…

My feed is split between western leftists insisting any criticism of Iran is pro-imperialist, and Iranian state figures promising to murder protestors

Brutal exposure of the Iranian diaspora: They support Zionism and the Gaza genocide because they desperately want to be seen as "white" and Western. They want to erase their Arab and Muslim ties to fit in.

Interview with Iranian anarchists: "the liberation of the people of Iran cannot be the result of projects imposed by foreign powers. Freedom can only emerge from the struggle and will of the people themselves". freedomnews.org.uk/2026/03/10/ira…

@arash_tehran @Vinncent @AntonJaegermm We're only just starting to address this even in the UK where the repression is far less intense, hambastegi to Iranians trying to organise in those conditions. FWIW my shout is @OrangoQuango 's Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal, pairs well with Bevins cosmonautmag.com/2022/02/to-tal…

The best place to look for answers to the question "why is the Iranian opposition not organized?" won't be find only in the works of Iran expert but in that of the likes of @Vinncent and @AntonJaegermm . I've said so for years ofc.

How we should relate to the Greens is one of the big questions for Your Party that needs urgent addressing. Join our talk on Monday 16th to directly engage in open political discussion. Not Green Eco-Populism but Working-Class Socialism How should Your Party relate to the Greens? 7-9pm Monday 16 March 2026 Online on zoom. Register at: socialist-yp.works/not-eco-pop Speakers: Barbara Duke @barb1917 | Alex Green | Ian Spencer @IanHenrySpencer | Anahita Zardoshti Chair: James Kulmer

@barneycarroll You know what would really help build the anti-imperialist movement? Giving our opponents the ammunition to frame us as pro-paedo. Only weeks after the Epstein files. Master strategists.

In case you thought 'ayatollah worship' was a bit strong, I just saw a thread about Khomeini, posted by a big account, in which they defended child marriage

@_georgina666 We're in this bizarre limbo space where the mainstream is still TV-centric even though the viewing figures are plummeting for everyone under retirement age

Article 1041 of Iran's civil code, as amended under Khomeini, prohibited marriage before the age of majority. Article 1210 defined that as 9 years old for girls. In 2002 this was amended to allow marriage from 13, as it is today Defending this harms the anti-imperialist movement